Economic Levers and Market

Good morning everybody. Please take your seats. Today is an easier day we won’t be travelling around so makeup. But for those of you that are in session, click Levers, Demographics and Market Forces that has been switch— it’s been switched to Room 550.

Some of you think you are in Room 550 already for the Policy and dissidence and Policy Levers. You are here in Room 190 456789 is what your tag will say. Reminder that your tag has your room numbers on the back. So Room 190 is for CRPD and Policy Levers.

I would like to ask if anyone has an early flight like 6:00 to let me know. If we need to — if there is enough people we might see what we can do to end a little earlier to get people to the airport more easily without missing of the good stuff.

And I think without further ado. That I can pass the mic on to Jutta. Thank you. Thank you Pina.

>>Jutta Treviranus: So I hope you enjoyed the weather that we ordered yesterday. And have seen a little bit more of Toronto.

Yesterday was quite a productive day. And today we are moving on to new perspectives. Yesterday we learned from current experience from mistakes and successes that we’ve had. And today we’d like to bring in some fresh voices — people who have not been in fact in this particular domain and have not been working on and slogging away at this for many, many years, but who are nonetheless working on convergent and similar issues.

Today is also a time to reflect and strategize on how we can use this moment in history. This time of disruption and this inflexion point to ensure that our future is more inclusive. In terms of economy and our markets while we have business compelled to compete for the largest markets leaving out the margins and unemployment rate for people with disabilities is abysmal. We now have financial meltdown, the Occupy movement and a digitally transformed economy.

In terms of technology, well, most products and services were designed for the typical or average user, and products were mass-produced while the major business strategy was to patent ambitiously, protect intellectual property making to modify products for the nonstandard user.

We have moved to digital systems, open access movements and 3D printing on demand which will change mass production.

In terms of policy, well, social programs have always been the most vulnerable in time of constraint and disability has frequently been a political pawn rather than a priority.

There is now a push for transparent government and movements where the margins are taking power.

And while universities have actually prided themselves in survival of the fittest — exclusive education — and educational jurisdictions tried to bring everyone to a fixed standard, we now have the transformation of education with ubiquitous connectivity in Google; it is not how— we no longer need human hard drives but a diversity of learners.

And so all of these jurisdictions and all of these areas and domains that we’re going to talk about today are at a point where there is an opportunity to rethink, to reformulate, to take away some of the silos and the barriers we have been facing. And we can participate in this redesign and hopefully design a much more inclusive future.

So we are welcoming a number of speakers who are going to be talking about these possible opportunities. And these as I said are fresh perspectives. Some of whom — actually one of the first ones — is someone who is in this particular domain: So the first speaker that we’ve invited is Richard Donovan, and many of you know Richard Donovan and I’m sure that you yesterday when the Lieutenant Governor was mentioning you will know of Rich’s connection with that.

Richard Donovan is a locally recognized subject matter on disability and is focused on unlocking economic value in the disability space.

And I would like to invite Rich to come to the podium — or, actually do you want to sit at the table?

[Applause]

>>Richard Donovan: Good morning, everyone. Can you can you hear me okay? So today we’ll begin the [cannot understand speaker]

Today I want to talk about two things. And I want to focus on the— I want to focus on the idea of — you’re probably thinking, what the hell does innovation have to do with disability?

Well, where does innovation come from? We often use extremes to drive new ideas. If we look at the— they built and designed the vehicle for a very different or would it be the [inaudible] it was built in the extreme years with — [inaudible] one.

The iPad was designed and tested by— by extreme users. A two-year-old can use the iPad as a blue line person. So that is a good example to take these extreme users and taking it to the mainstream consumer application.

Disability is probably the most extreme user going today. If you have ever seen me try to use a consumer product you will know what the hell I’m talk about.

It’s not easy for people with disabilities to; it’s difficult.

And now what we have been doing in the past with disabilities is designing for disabilities and we actually got that backwards. The way that we go about this is that designing for disabilities I?

>> So [inaudible] sitting in the big [inaudible] that’s a goal. That individual would likely have different vendors or different agencies but they might approach to get good — if you have seven to ten agencies and you get five people at these agencies how is the organization going to track all of those agencies and all of those people?

It’s not skilled that way. Because you have to boil it down to one or two partners. You have to get the volume up. You have to find numbers.

And when you employ 90,000 people, 300 people is not a scale. So the question is how do we use innovation to get that scale?

How do we use innovation to [inaudible] as opposed to we’re never going get there.

I’ll give you another good — example of scale. [inaudible] designed to employ people with disabilities in the distribution centre. And they did it for altruistic reasons. They were trying to be a good company, quote, unquote. But they could not realize that — they realized that over the first years they crossed that and they could not figure out why. And we’re not talking 3 or 4%. We’re talking 20%. Over the entire distribution center. That is a big number.

Now the study figured out that people with disabilities did they do something different? You have to change and design the processes differently. And in doing so the employees took the complexity out of the system. Because they looked at the process that was one hundred steps and they said, why are you doing it like that? Do it like this. It’s easy.

So a hundred-step process became a 20-step process.

And when you scale that up, as far I’m concerned in the distribution centre, they are seeing some serious numbers. That is saving the distribution centre a lot of money. That is $160 million gone. That is significant. That is real. And that’s directly from making the decision to hire people with disabilities.

But not because you hired people with disabilities, what drove it is the cost and value. What drove it is the scale.

What drove it is finding the way to do it, not just do it.

And I think that is an important point to make, a lot of folks get up in front of these microphones and tell us what we should do.

And frankly, that is easy to do. That is easy — the easy way out. The real question is why?

Why — why do these owners of [inaudible] going to have you to do this? That is the question that we need answer.

I think if you took a poll and asked who was against hiring people with disabilities — and thin focus on the two drivers of value in disability. Innovation and scale. If we do that the rest will follow.

>> Rich, I didn’t get the name of the U.S. company. Did you say the name of the U.S. company?

>>Richard Donovan: Yes, Walgreen’s.

>> Yes, that is being promoted because they have a staff member who has son with a cognitive disability, you know, right?

>>Richard Donovan: Yes, that is what originally motivated them.

They have done it and the experience is a 20% gain which I’m a skeptical guy. Even with that 20% number I have to say, okay, let’s see what this really is right? But when someone else does it and gets the same result, now you have something that is real. P/\&G is [inaudible]

>>Axel Leblois: Better? Good morning I’m Axel Leblois and your promotion of the extreme user is really powerful. There is a framework a natural classification fortunately that is now. Which is pretty well developed and well interesting to — and I was wondering if you had ever looked at it and see how it would make the adoption of the extreme user to some of the key categories of functionalities?

>>Richard Donovan: What we’re finding is that there is an in these categories. And when you want to get inside it’s very important to find, how shall we say, people that live their reality is in the extreme user environment, but they can also articulate that environment for use in a commercial pilot.

So we found we’ve had better success finding a crossover of extreme users in creative people regardless of their functionality.

So we go to artists, entrepreneur new years, designers, ones with disabilities that had to go shopping. As a dad with a disability I can relate to that.

Those kinds of — end up being very powerful to get people to articulate those challenges in the medium and usable way for the company.

I’m finding that when you — [inaudible] inside technique with disability it makes the company a lot more comfortable feel like, I actually [inaudible] because they don’t understand our world. And they probably — There is probably not much surreal in teaching them the intricacies of what disability is because all they really want is the inside. They want to be able to learn how this market works and the environment.

And that for the — for consume and in doing so they are designing for disability. So it is a fine line to walk here.

It is not complicated — do not complicate their world by make them feel comfortable.

>>Jutta Treviranus: One more. Yes.

>>Pina D’Intino: Thank you morning Richard, it’s Pina. As you know there’s been a lot of discussion with the wall green model, the best buy and so on and so forth. And a lot of discussion on measuring the return on investment. And while there are many, many numbers out there to, you know, support the notion that doing this has a number to it — has a, you know, investment —, what is your experience on how organizations are still requesting and demanding that sort of approach today, versus you would, you know, 2, 3, five years ago when it seemed like it was much more?

>>Richard Donovan: That is a great question, thank you. One of the things that disability was missing was data. Now we know who has what, we now all this medical stuff. But we really don’t know how people react with disabilities in a corporate environment.

We don’t know how people react to different messages. We don’t know how people react to certain images. We as a group I always put up a whole bunch of images and messages and get [inaudible] but that data really does exist.? So what is the conversation I have with my client? Hey, before you ask, go for the study [inaudible] with the [inaudible] to get their feedback on what your processes are.

And that is the traditional view of it. So you put [inaudible] and you get their reaction to those publications. That data doesn’t exist in the public domain today. But companies are going out to the market now and gathering that type of data.

I know because I do some — it started, that data has started to be built and in 3 to 5 years we’ll know pretty succinctly how it is affecting the workplace in a commercial setting.

The second part of your question was around turnaround investment and that is — that is what I do for a living. I write specifically how corporations get a return on their investment from the disability so that they [inaudible] we’re not quite read are did I quite ready to go to Europe with it yet but we’re doing well in North America.

We can tell you without a doubt that disability does have an impact on the bottom line. But the returns are different for each company.

I will tell you though that in the U.S. 78% of companies today have no visible activity relative to disability. So there is still a lot of room for improvement. There is still is a lot of opportunity to make some money from these companies.

>>Jutta Treviranus: Thank you. Were you finished? Thank you. I think what we’re — there is one more question but I think we’ve probably — well why don’t you — quickly? Is it a quick question?

>> I’m not quite remembering all of the details but the president of Wal-Mart issued a mandate last year for companies to hire people with disabilities. Is that — this is last year. Are you aware of that mandate as still going forward? What is the effective date of that?

>>Richard Donovan: There is a bit of history mind that. For the last 20 years they have issued and set that mandate. And the numbers actually have gone backwards instead of forwards. I think what people forget when these mandates are set is that the government itself is probably the most untrustworthy agency in the U.S.

And I don’t want to use words like dysfunctional but that is what I think it is.

So when you put those two things together, changing a culture is an incredibly difficult thing to do. It is difficult to do in an organization of 100 people, let alone an organization of millions of people around the globe.

The reality is that this is hard to do. You stand in the board room and say, I want to do this. Well you can do it but that doesn’t mean it will happen.

So what governments globally need realize is that this applies to organizational change. And I think we need the will to do that within the organizations. The will to do that [inaudible] out?

>> So it sounds like we have begun quite a number of potential topics and we’ll have a chance to speak about those this the breakout rooms. So thank you very much, Rich.